A character string, binary string, text, image, a column, or an expression that includes a column. Do not use expressions that include aggregate functions.

start

An integer or an expression that can be implicitly converted to int, which specifies where the substring begins.

length

An integer or an expression that can be implicitly converted to int, which specifies the length of the substring.

Returns character data if expressionis one of the supported character data types. Returns binary data if expressionis one of the supported binary data types. If start = 1, then the substring begins from the first character of the expression.

The returned string is the same type as the given expression with the exceptions shown in the following table.